Whatever we do, I think we need to move away from the text installer now...

That's a great comment for soliciting lots of responses! I think we all know that everyone has an opinion on those matters. The only two advantages that I can see in a graphical installer are: 1) makes newbies slightly more comfortable during the install process (but what really throws newbies off, I believe, is not the installer type, but the concept of partitioning) and 2) it might look somewhat sexier.

The disadvantage of a graphical installer is the extra CD space such will consume, at the expense of other applications, particularly if we want to stick to CD's and not DVD's. I also wonder if a graphical installer won't be somewhat slower? I am SOOO impressed with the speed of a VL install. I can install VL58 SOHO from beginning to end on my AMD XP3200 box in under 12 minutes. That is truly amazing....

« Last Edit: June 21, 2007, 07:57:13 am by lagagnon »

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The installer said, it requires 4 GB for full install ! I took out some packages, leaving kde and just essential packages, it took 2.8 GB.

Ouch! It's getting harder and harder to call VL a 'lightweight' distro these days. The ISO for 5.8 Standard was over 40% larger than the one for 5.1 Std, even with the switch to TLZ! Honestly though, I agree with the 'one app per function' philosophy. "Keep it simple, keep it small and let the end user decide what their operating system is going to be." Plus it keeps the menu less cluttered & simpler for newbies.

I prefer the text installer. Keep it light, keep it fast, even if that means that the user has to do some of the work. It is not like it's something you're going to do every day. Yes, it requires a little more work to set up and configure, but you end up with your system, customized to your hardware and personal preferences. And it will not change until you decide to change it.

I am afraid that after a graphical installer, we'll move towards "I want everything to be point and click, and everything to be done for me automatically, like <insert flavor of *buntu>". To achieve this you need a whole little OS in the installer, hardware detection on each boot, all sorts of polling daemons and services. I see that as contrary to the VL philosophy.

you end up with your system, customized to your hardware and personal preferences. And it will not change until you decide to change it.

That has nothing to do with text vs. graphical. Just because we make a graphical installer, doesn't mean we can't do it the Vector way. I fully expect the installer to look much like what we've had for quite a while with VASM: almost the exact same thing, whether you use GUI or text-mode.

That said, I think there's plenty of room for improvement even in the TUI installer. There's gotta be a better text-mode partition manager out there than cfdisk, for example.

The only effort thus far I know of in this direction is Joe1962's installer, written in gambas. This will mean there needs to be a live environment with at least X running, and the gambas runtime (and it's dependencies) need to be loaded. This means a larger .iso, which would be quite problematic if we want to keep SOHO 6 a 1 CD distro (especially given Slacks new footprint). Unless we include less software. This would mean the ratio (useful software / iso size ) will drop quite a lot: bigger iso size for less software installed. It's probably slower too and more things can go wrong (you don't just need a working system, but also an autoconfigured X). Users with older computers might get into trouble trying to use X live. What a deal.

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I fully expect the installer to look much like what we've had for quite a while with VASM: almost the exact same thing, whether you use GUI or text-mode.

Well, in that case what's the point of using a graphical installer at all ? I mean vasm in X works but it's not what you'd call more attractive than the cli version.

... Honestly though, I agree with the 'one app per function' philosophy. "Keep it simple, keep it small...

I agree. But every time a new release comes up we get a flurry of requests to add this multimedia package over that multimedia package. Or put them all in (which we seem to have done with 5.8) - hell, we have xine, mplayer, amarok, KsCD, VLC and many others in SOHO, and it is almost as bloated for multimedia stuff in 5.8 Standard. My humble opinion of course....

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About the GUI installer ... I tried Windows XP yesterday (I haven't installed WIndows for a long long time).Guess what.The installer is plain blue background and white text. Oh and some yellow on progress bar.The GUI portion is not launched but after restarting.I wonder if Microsoft also receives a lot of requests to upgrade the installer

my thoughts exactly..................anyone install XP from scratch lately?? they have been doing this for five years no complaints. Since we have such a divided camp on the installer how about a compromise text to get the packages installed gui for the final setup just an idea.............vec

I like the idea of mouse support in the text environment - easy enough to do with the gpm daemon, I believe.

As I hinted above in my last post on this thread maybe we could also add an option to the present text installer to completely take over the hard drive, automatically apportion 2X RAM for swap and stick everything else into one partition "/". In other words automatically partition the drive sort of like many other distros and Windows does. Then newbies do not have to worry about the partitioning process.

That sort of partitioning scares the daylights out of me but I do think a lot of newbies are put off by the partitioning process. Just an idea...I believe Joe1962 was going to have such an option in his graphical installer?

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